True Story 10.04
Fluent German speaker flunks every German language test
The setting for this story
A 60-year-old woman from Somalia, Abdiya, had lived in Germany for twelve years. After she enrolled in a German class for non-native speakers, she told Michaela, the instructor, that this wasn’t the first German course she had taken. “But,” confessed Abdiya, “I flunked all the previous ones.”
A story of misaligned minds6
Abdiya came from an impoverished area of Somalia and as a child had never attended school. Amazingly, though, she spoke and wrote German remarkably well and even commanded a sizeable German vocabulary. Michaela couldn’t fathom why Abdiya had flunked her previous courses.
It turned out, however, that Abdiya was stumped by exercises that required the student to have command of parts of speech and manipulate isolated words. For example, she couldn’t master simple fill-in-the-blank exercises for inserting the correct verb form into a sentence. Other tasks that proved beyond Abdiya’s capabilities included filling out tables and answering multiple-choice questions.
Yet when Michaela worked with her on these exercises orally, Abdiya made virtually no errors! And she could turn out freely written German texts with ease. Michaela was baffled.
Michaela’s question
Abdiya speaks and writes German very well, so why can’t she pass a typical German language course?
Critique of story 10.04
Over almost the first five decades of her life, Abdiya’s ordinary daily interactions had all been with people whose ways of thinking and understanding were, like hers, holistic or relational. Neither she nor, most likely, any of her Somali neighbors had ever darkened the door of a Western-style school, where she would have started to learn to systematically regard things and concepts in terms of their component parts. As a result, her mindset was thoroughly holistic – which had enabled Abdiya to master everyday German.
Only as a middle-aged adult did Abdiya first find herself in a Western-inspired classroom, studying German. Here she was expected to apply parts-specific analytic habits of thought, which were simply beyond her experience and comprehension. Taking such courses again and again didn’t help.
Let’s take a step back in time. Language instruction as conceived in the West is an invention of linguists who, while going to school for many years to gain their professional expertise, mastered analytic skills of thinking and reasoning. Applying those skills, they developed methods and materials for language instruction that focus on parts: for example, breaking down a sentence into its component parts, classifying each part grammatically and syntactically, and devising rules for fitting the parts together to make meaning. In addition, language teaching has always made heavy use of exercises that must be written, itself a detail-oriented analytic activity. Thus, language teaching is largely, if not entirely, governed by analytic methods of making sense of the world. Such methods are the ones Abdiya never encountered until she was about fifty years old.
Analytic ways of perceiving and thinking are learned skills. They are vastly easier to acquire during childhood – especially if one attends a Western-style school – than during adulthood.
For thought
The most daunting challenge that initially confronts many field anthropologists is to master the local language – fast – as an adult.7
For the story of one anthropologist’s struggle with the language and the culture of a remote indigenous tribe in Brazil, read Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, by Daniel Everett. Everett was both an anthropologist and a Christian missionary hoping to convert the members of the tribe, named the Pirahã. He, his wife, and their three young children joined a small camp of Pirahã, whose language was utterly baffling and whose ways were staggeringly different from Western ways. It didn’t work out as planned. Everett’s wife left with the kids, he lost his faith, and he didn’t convert the Pirahã to Christianity, but he did figure out their language. The blow by blow of how this all went down is, by turns, intellectually challenging (as Everett struggles to grasp the Pirahã language), harrowing (snakes!), and generally mesmerizing.
Related stories
Story 10.16 concerns a group of learners who also obtained correct answers but had no idea how they were able to do that.
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Endnotes:
6 Bekaan, n.p. Accessed in Ott, 112–13.
7 The term “field anthropologist” denotes one who relocates to an unfamiliar society, lives among its people for months, sometimes a year or more, and carries out ethnographic research (i.e., participant observation). I wrote that this challenge confronts “many” such anthropologists because not all study a society with a language that is previously unknown to the anthropologist.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.